College & Research Libraries News (C&RL News) is the official newsmagazine and publication of record of the Association of College & Research Libraries, providing articles on the latest trends and practices affecting academic and research libraries.

Grants and Acquisitions

Arizona State University (ASU) has been awarded a $450,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a three-year project designed to build and expand community-driven collections, in an effort to preserve and improve ASU’s archives and give voice to historically marginalized communities. Under the leadership of ASU Library Archivist Nancy Godoy and coinvestigators Sujey Vega and Lorrie McAllister, the project—titled “Engaging, Educating, and Empowering: Developing Community-Driven Archival Collections”—will implement Archives and Preservation Workshops and Digitization and Oral History Days, as well as digitize and make publicly accessible existing archival collections from the ASU Library Chicano/a Research Collection and Greater Arizona Collection. In 2012, the Arizona Archives Matrix Project, a statewide initiative to gather data about local archives, identified several historically marginalized communities in Arizona, including LGBT, Asian American, African American, and the Latino community, which make up 30 percent of Arizona’s population but is represented in less than 2 percent of known archival collections. With the aim to address this inequity, the ASU project will build on Godoy’s previous work coestablishing the Arizona LGBT History Project and collaborating with ASU faculty members Vega and Vanessa Fonseca on an ASU School of Transborder Studies seed grant, which implemented archives and preservation workshops statewide and helped to assess community needs and interests.

Acquisitions

The personal research library of historian Jonathon Riley-Smith has been acquired by Oakland University Libraries. The late Riley-Smith was a historian of the Crusades and the Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History. Prior to his death in September 2016, he was a Fellow of Emmanuel College at Cambridge University. Riley-Smith was also a Knight of Grace and Devotion of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and Bailiff Grand Cross of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St John. He is the author of more than 15 books on the Crusades and has mentored more than 30 doctoral students. The collection includes more than 1,100 volumes from Riley-Smith’s personal library, slides of crusader sites in the Middle East, lecture notes, and interview transcripts. While most of the volumes are contemporary, some important pre–20th-century works are included.

The records of the children’s literary magazineCricket have been donated to the Special Collections Research Center of Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. In all, the Cricket literary magazine collection consists of 100 boxes of archival materials, including correspondence, illustrations, literary manuscripts, printed materials, and a complete set of the literary magazine itself. Cricket is an illustrated literary magazine for children published in the United States. Marianne Carus had worked on “literature-based basic readers” for the school markets and had learned from teachers that there was a classroom demand for high-quality, short reading material. Founded in September 1973 by Carus, her intent was to create “The New Yorker for children.” Created on the belief that children naturally explore their world through the lens of imagination, Cricket has always stayed true to its guiding principal: the belief that imaginative young readers will respond enthusiastically to wonderful stories accompanied by world-class illustrations, building a lifelong love of great literature and beautiful art that will stay with them throughout their lives.